Does pride goeth before ...?

• Author: Estrada, Andrea
• Position: ON THE COUCH

AS HUMAN EMOTIONS GO, pride has earned a bad rap. Christians count it among the seven deadly sins, the ancient Greeks charged it with provoking destruction by the gods, and nonindustrial peoples around the world consider it a source of bad luck. Still, some behavioral scientists reject pride as a universal emotion, arguing that individuals in other cultures, such as Japan, lack the pride-achievement motivation so familiar to Westerners.

However, does pride really deserve its reputation both as a menace and an emotion limited to only some cultures? Perhaps not, say a group of researchers at the Center for Evolutionary Psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Pride, they contend, served an important function in social life that led to its evolution among our foraging ancestors. Their study, which covers 16 countries and four continents, appears in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"The function of pride is to motivate the individual to cultivate traits and pick courses of action that increase others' tendency to value them," says lead author Daniel Sznycer, CEP scientist at UCSB and a postdoctoral researcher at Arizona State University. "Natural selection would have crafted a neural program--pride--that makes you care about how much others value you, and motivates you to achieve and advertise socially valued things."

The authors refer to this theory--which brings together the views of several evolutionary researchers--as "the advertisement-recalibration theory of pride."

Explains coauthor Leda Cosmides, professor of psychology and codirector of CEP: "Our ancestors lived close to the edge, and depended in their daily life on acts of kindness by their fellow band members--kindness that was increased the more they valued you."

Coauthor John Tooby, professor of anthropology and co-director of CEP, adds: "The pride system is designed to give others some vote in what behavior you end up choosing, so that they have an ongoing stake in your welfare. This predicts not only that people should have a detailed map of what members of their community value socially, but that the intensity of pride someone feels in achieving some specific outcome should closely match the degree to which others would value that specific achievement. This helps you determine which value-promoting acts are worth the effort."

Depending on the magnitude of the anticipated pride when considering a course of action, individuals will...